Documentary ‘The Harvest’ will be screened at the Overby Center

The Overby Center will host a screening of “The Harvest,” a documentary film about the transformation of a small Mississippi town during desegregation. The program will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Blackmon, who wrote and co-produced the film.

The film chronicles changes in Blackmon’s hometown of Leland, a cotton town in the Mississippi Delta. After the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, little more than token efforts were made to integrate schools in Mississippi. That changed in October 1969 when the high court ordered Mississippi schools to fully and immediately desegregate. As a result, Blackmon, 6 years old at the time, became part of the first class of Black and white children who would attend all 12 grades together in Leland.

The film tells the story of how that first class became possible, then traces the lives of Blackmon and his classmates, teachers, and parents from the first day of school through high school graduation in 1982. The films ends in the present – with one of the classmates now superintendent of the local schools, making progress but also still facing many of the same issues of 50 years earlier. It is a riveting portrait of how those children’s lives were transformed and how the town — and America — changed. 

Blackmon is a journalist, former Wall Street Journal senior national correspondent, and professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”

The program will be Oct. 17 and begin at 7 p.m. in the Overby Center Auditorium on the University of Mississippi campus. The public is invited, and free parking is available. 

For more information, please feel free to contact crews@ayrix.net.